Broadcasting

Drupal goes to Rio

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 03:05:57 -0400

As the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro enters its second and final week, it's worth noting that the last time I blogged about Drupal and the Olympics was way back in 2008 when I called attention to the fact that Nike was running its sponsorship site on Drupal 6 and using Drupal's multilingual capabilities to deliver their message in 13 languages.

While watching some track and field events on television, I also spent a lot of time on my laptop with the NBC Olympics website. It is a site that has run on Drupal for several years, and this year I noticed they took it up a notch and did a redesign to enhance the overall visitor experience.

Last week NBC issued a news release that it has streamed over one billion minutes of sports via their site so far. That's a massive number!

I take pride in knowing that an event as far-reaching as the Olympics is being delivered digitally to a massive audience by Drupal. In fact, some of the biggest sporting leagues around the globe run their websites off of Drupal, including NASCAR, the NBA, NFL, MLS, and NCAA. Massive events like the Super Bowl, Kentucky Derby, and the Olympics run on Drupal, making it the chosen platform for global athletic organizations.

Update on August 24: This week, the NBC Sports Group issued a press release stating that the Rio 2016 Olympics was the most successful media event in history! Digital coverage across NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports app set records, with 3.3 billion total streaming minutes, 2.71 billion live streaming minutes, and 100 million unique users. According to the announcement, live streaming minutes for the Rio games nearly doubled that of all Olympic games combined, and digital coverage amassed 29 percent more unique users than the London Olympics four years prior. Drupal was proud to be a part of the largest digital sporting event in history. Looking forward to breaking more records in the years to come!

VT4 using Drupal

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:26:48 -0500

Flemish commercial television channel VT4 is using Drupal on http://www.vt4.be. VT4 is part of ProSiebenSat.1 Media, the second-largest broadcasting group in Europe. Cool!

Eén using Drupal

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:30:55 -0400

Eén (Dutch for 'one'), a public TV station reaching millions of people in Belgium, redesigned its website using Drupal: see http://een.be.

CNN using Drupal

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:56:42 -0400

Cable news network CNN just released CNNgo.com into beta, fully developed with Drupal. CNNgo is a guide to six of Asia's greatest cities. What is interesting about the site is that they are looking to complement their professional editors with local bloggers, opinion makers, and the very people that form the soul of these cities.

As a traditional publisher, you have to figure out how to turn audiences into participants because it opens the doors for better advertising and new monetization opportunities. I think CNNgo.com is a great example of how companies like CNN can use the power of Drupal to implement a social media strategy through an add-on site.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation using Drupal

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:06:55 -0400

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) started using Drupal for a number of properties like ABC Digital Music, ABC Country and ABC Jazz.

The ABC is Australia's national broadcaster, a public owned enterprise funded by the Australian government that has been around for 80 years.

It's really great to see the Drupal market in Australia breaking open! One day I should make it to Australia too. ;-)

Radio Netherlands Worldwide using Drupal

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:17:50 -0400

Radio Netherlands Worldwide (Radio Nederland Wereldomroep in Dutch or RNW for short) is a public radio and television network based in The Netherlands. Radio Netherlands Worldwide is a very old international public broadcaster, with regular transmissions that began in 1927 to the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.

What is interesting about the site is not the design or the implementation, but the fact that, after many years with Alterian (formerly Mediasurface), they switched to Drupal. Alterian is a supplier of proprietary content management systems, with their flagship product being Morello. The RNW started with the Internet early on (1992) and by doing so suffered from the law of the handicap of a head start: a history of dated, proprietary CMS-es that held them back from moving to the more current software.

RNW selected Drupal because of its multi-lingual capabilities (they support up to 6 languages, including Chinese and Arabic content) and Drupal's flexibility and agility. The migration to Drupal was done by Dutch Open Projects and took 3 months with a team of 5 people.

Bert Boerland, project manager at Dutch Open Projects, wrote the following on the switch to Drupal: By itself, the fact that Radio Netherlands Worldwide switches from a proprietary CMS towards an Open Source CMS is not the biggest news. However, the switch is a milestone since it symbolizes that companies that didn't look to Open Source and only listened to the proprietary "prietpraat" are moving over! [The word prietpraat is Dutch and translates roughly to "childish non-sense".]

With both RNW and the Dutch public broadcaster NCRV using Drupal, and through Acquia's partnership with Woodwing (Woodwing is a Dutch company), the media landscape in Europe's low-lands has some critical mass to push Drupal into more traditional broadcasting companies. Drupal starts to disrupt the traditional, proprietary web content management space increasingly more.

With an editorial staff of over one hundred people, RNW publicizes dozens of postings a day including their own video and audio, and will soon incorporate even more, including user-generated content and content from their five-thousand-plus partner stations around the world. To keep all this content on track, RNW choose Drupal, coupled with the usual contributed modules (CCK and Views, FCKeditor, Pathauto, etc). They use Organic Groups as their core for separating and integrating their eleven editorial staffs. RNW gets lots of traffic from around the world and so, gets lots of spam, they are also a paying Mollom user; Mollom blocks hundreds of spam comments a day for them.

Ketnet using Drupal

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:04:02 -0500

Ketnet is a public children's television channel in Belgium, owned and operated by the VRT, a public broadcaster. The Ketnet site is using Drupal! (Hat tip: Seutje)

Disney using Drupal

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:35:11 -0500

The Walt Disney Company is using Drupal for the ABC Family community website. ABC Family is a cable television network that they currently own. In 2002, Disney acquired the network from News Corp for $3.2 billion USD.

RTBF using Drupal

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:44:46 -0400

RTBF, the national broadcasting organization of the French-speaking part of Belgium, switched to Drupal. See http://www.rtbf.be. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the design but it must be one of the biggest Drupal deployments in Belgium. The site was built by One Agency. (Hat tip: Kristof De Jaeger.)

France24 using Drupal

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:38:07 -0400

France24, France's answer to BBC World and CNN, recently switched from Magnolia, an Open Source CMS written in Java, to Drupal. What is interesting is that France24 was one of Magnolia's flagship references ... I wonder what happened.